US Judge to impose death sentence on Bridgeport triple murder

Michael P. Mayko

Updated 12:48 am, Tuesday, December 11, 2012

NEW HAVEN -- When investigators opened the door to a Bridgeport apartment on Aug. 24, 2005, they stepped into a gruesome, stomach-churning scene that could have been mistaken for the goriest of horror flicks.

Splattered blood dripped from "every wall ... and the floor to the ceiling" of the first-floor apartment in a bleak cement building at 215 Charles St., Assistant U.S. Attorney Tracy Dayton said.

Three battered victims lay hog-tied and mummified in "so many layers of duct tape...that it was difficult to pull off," she said.

One tortured victim's face was so pulverized that the bones could no longer hold the flesh in place, according to the prosecutor.

Now, more than a year after his trial, a guilty verdict and an unsuccessful attempt -- so far -- to reverse the jury's decision, Azibo "Dreddy" Aquart, the reputed head of an alarmingly violent Bridgeport crack-dealing crew, will face the ultimate punishment.

U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton is expected to sentence the convicted killer on Monday to death by lethal injection. It will mark the first time in at least 200 years of Connecticut federal court history that a person has been sentenced to die for his crimes.

Arterton cleared the final hurdle to sentencing when she denied Aquart's request to set aside his conviction on charges of conspiring to commit and committing drug-related murders and conspiring to possess with the intent to distribute crack.

Witnesses testified during Aquart's 2011 trial that he ordered a terrifying attack on Tina Johnson, a small-time crack dealer who refused to pack up and leave his block, and anyone in her home who got in the way.

Aquart recruited his brother, Azikiwe; Efrain Johnson, his girlfriend's brother, and John Taylor to break into Tina Johnson's apartment early one morning. They bolted the door shut from the inside, bound Johnson, her boyfriend James Reid and Basil Williams, a family friend, with duct tape before the Aquarts beat them to death with the bats.

But Dayton said it was more than a drug war, "it was a slaughter."

Azikiwe Aquart has been sentenced to life in prison while Taylor received a nine-year sentence after cooperating. Both pleaded guilty. Efrain Johnson, also convicted by a jury, faces a possible life term when he is sentenced.

Azibo Aquart lost his first attempt at challenging the verdict when Arterton ruled against him last week. Once she imposes sentence Monday he will start a process that will wind itself through the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York and into the U.S. Supreme Court.

Michael Sheehan and Justin Smith maintained that Lashika Johnson, the defendant's girlfriend and Efrain Johnson's sister, lied while testifying as a prosecution witness in the separate trials of her ex-boyfriend and brother.

That testimony involved her answers to questions about being threatened by investigators.

She denied that claim during Aquart's trial.

But six months later, during her brother's case, she admitted a federal prosecutor screamed at her, threatened to put her in shackles and then jail, and would make sure she lost custody of her children.

Aquart's defense team submitted a transcript of that testimony, citing the inconsistencies.

Johnson was asked in that case by her brother's lawyer: "Did you feel that if you didn't start saying different things that you could be going to jail ... and you could lose your kids?"

She responded "Yeah."

But Arterton was not convinced that would have changed the verdict for Aquart.

"The jury's decision to convict Mr. Aquart could hardly have been materially affected by how accurately she characterized the government's confrontation with her during her Oct. 14, 2008, interview," Arterton said in a 10-page decision.

The judge wrote that the jury "had ample opportunity to assess Ms. Johnson's credibility as a witness, knowing of law-enforcement pressure on her to change her initial versions and denials, which the jury could consider along with the testimony of 62 other witnesses in (Aquart's) trial, including the testimony of the defendant's drug-trafficking co-conspirators, phone records, DNA evidence, prison tapes and the testimony of John Taylor...who actually participated in the murders of the three victims."